I think I may have found what confuses all these people. They
may actually be thinking about simple deniability (just
hiding data) instead of plausible deniability (where the
attacker knows something may be in those "random" bytes
but cannot prove it and in particular it is "plausible"
that no data is in there).
I have updated FAQ Item 5.18 to hopefully make that clearer.
Regards,
Arno
On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 18:58:16 CEST, Arno Wagner wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 18:33:37 CEST, Police Terror wrote:
> > You obviously did not look at the example because the data is not hidden
> > steganographically.
>> You obviously did not understand what I wrote, because
> I never claimed that in this case it was. I only claimed that
> at this time this is the only valid known way to do plausible
> deniablility.
>> [...]
>> > About a well engineered solution: today I just found VeraCrypt which
> > actually works well. I encourage people to try it. It can create hidden
> > volumes.
>> ... and that have all the problems hidden volumes come with.
> They also managed to create additional problems TrueCrypt does
> not have, for example a broken password "quality" assessment
> that cannot be bypassed (alternatively you get a broken
> password iteration, that can lead to minutes of unlock time).
> My trust in the VeraCrypt developers is much, much lower than
> in the original TrueCrypt developers.
>> Seriously. Bright-eyed "can do" attitudes have no place in
> IT security. They do much more harm than good and they endanger
> users.
>> Regards,
> Arno
>> > Arno Wagner:
> > > What I would like to see is a plausible deniability technique
> > > that is not just a worthless tech-demo, but where the
> > > "plausible" part was actually well engineered with regards
> > > to how things work in the real world and that is not limited
> > > to a very small amount of steganographically hidden data.
> > > So far, none exists.
> > >
> > > The thing is, for an incompetent attacker it is already
> > > enough to just remove a partition from the partition table
> > > and re-create it at need in the same place. For a competent
> > > attacker, the things that exist today just provide probable
> > > cause that you are trying to hide something and hence make
> > > things worse.
> > >
> > > As it is, these tools are of negative worth, as they give
> > > users a false sense of security.
> > >
> > > Also refer to FAQ 5.18 for my analysis of the status-quo.
> > > The paper by Schneier et. al. I reference provides an
> > > excellent in-depth analysis of the problems with the idea
> > > of plausible deniability in a real OS environment.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Arno
> > >
> > > On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 14:16:05 CEST, Police Terror wrote:
> > >> Here's the tool:
> > >>
> > >> https://github.com/RojavaCrypto/hiddencrypt> > >>
> > >> Mostly proof of concept for now.
> > >>
> > >> Would be cool in the future to work something better out by hacking
> > >> cryptsetup itself. Maybe if there's headerless volumes (that just look
> > >> like random data).
> > >>
> > >> Multiple deniable Linux installs would be a killer feature.
> > >>
> > >> Milan Broz:
> > >>> On 06/24/2016 11:56 AM, Police Terror wrote:
> > >>>> Ahhh yes! Thank you Diagon and Milan.
> > >>>> I've added now the -q switch.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> I looked at the pycryptsetup but 2 things:
> > >>>>
> > >>>> 1. It's not Python 3
> > >>>> 2. It's an extra dependency and not in the repos.
> > >>>
> > >>> Fedora has both Python3 and 2 builds but other
> > >>> distros do not compile it probably.
> > >>>
> > >>> (It was designed for Anaconda installer mainly.)
> > >>>
> > >>> Milan
> > >>> _______________________________________________
> > >>> dm-crypt mailing list
> > >>> dm-crypt at saout.de> > >>> http://www.saout.de/mailman/listinfo/dm-crypt> > >>>
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> dm-crypt mailing list
> > >> dm-crypt at saout.de> > >> http://www.saout.de/mailman/listinfo/dm-crypt> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > dm-crypt mailing list
> > dm-crypt at saout.de> > http://www.saout.de/mailman/listinfo/dm-crypt>> --
> Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., Email: arno at wagner.name> GnuPG: ID: CB5D9718 FP: 12D6 C03B 1B30 33BB 13CF B774 E35C 5FA1 CB5D 9718
> ----
> A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers. -- Plato
>> If it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of
> "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." -- Bruce Schneier
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Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., Email: arno at wagner.name
GnuPG: ID: CB5D9718 FP: 12D6 C03B 1B30 33BB 13CF B774 E35C 5FA1 CB5D 9718
----
A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers. -- Plato
If it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of
"news" is "something that hardly ever happens." -- Bruce Schneier